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It seems Facebook is quite impressed with some application developers and wants to include the best ones in its own circle. So after the recent purchase of Instagram, the social media giant has laid its hands on Tagtile - a mobile-based customer loyalty application. Tagtile was a fairly new venture with good potential for growth but it is now with Mark Zuckerberg for an undisclosed sum. For the application developing company of course it is a good opportunity as it will now grow with one of the biggest brand names in the digital world. As per Tagtile, FB is acquiring substantially “all of its financial assets” and this will also make marketing and managing customers easier.

The foundations of Tagtile lie in San Francisco and its co-founders Abheek Anand and Soham Mazumdar are engineers who have worked with likes of VMware Incorporated and Google. After acquiring the company, Facebook revealed that it can now send coupons to people that can be printed and redeemed using mobile phones. The principal customers for Tagtile so far have been some small and medium-sized business enterprises and their franchises. These either use the company's application to link up with their existing reward schemes, or order new ones where these did not exist before. The good thing about Tagtile apps is that engagement has been remarkable and the app has been used between two and ten times more for interactions on a per-merchant basis than Foursquare.

Interestingly, Facebook has also started a beta of new offers program. With Instagram and Tagtile at its service, FB can now make the most of e-commerce/loyalty/social shopping domains that it has been trying to get into. The new app will help merchants to offer discounts and other promotional schemes through their Facebook profiles and the social networking site will be more closely associated with the actual transaction. Will it slowly turn into a full fledged online shopping mall?